My Tech Journal

Through a request email enlisting educators interested in running the Boulder Computer Science Education Week 2017(CSEd Week) in their schools, I got involved in this amazing program that gave me a fun-filled and amazing experience. The CSEd Week program occurs annually worldwide, within the first weeks of December. It is aimed at introducing children to Computer Science, specifically, creating computer programs and robots among others, hence, appreciate the importance of Computer Science in their daily lives. The email was sent out by Lindsay Craig, a Technology Educator and Program Director, Boulder CSEd Week. Prior to the interaction, through a collaboration between the participating school in Uganda and Colorado, educators would introduce their students to Computer Science using Scratch. Scratch is a programming language, and an online community that allows children to imagine, program and share interactive stories, games and animations. I was interested in the progra...

Uganda’s worst nightmares like poverty and unemployment have been normally traced back to the poor education system of the country over the past years. The education system being more theoretical than practical and occasional reference to real life experiences and scenarios. Solutions have been pointed out and adopted, yet the problem still exists.    In 2005, the Ugandan government made science subjects compulsory to all secondary school students. The move was aimed at producing more practical professionals that would transform Uganda from a developing to a middle income country through technological and scientific innovations. The performance of core sciences at O’Level is very poor for example the majority of students who sat for the UNEB examinations between 2005– 2008 scored failures in the core sciences with physics being the worst performed. Only just two years ago in 2014, the UNEB board noted that the performance in science and Math was worrying and it’s beca...

On a very hot Thursday in the first week of January 2016, I hopped on a bus headed for Gulu. I was super excited. It was my first time to go to the North. Naturally, I had all the imaginations anyone could have about an entirely new place. The journey was long but to my surprise I was awake the whole, thanks to the fear of missing out on the adventure. I saw different things like rare fruits that we barely have in the Central or Western region of the country. With sights of the Karuma Bridge, one of the many beautifully nature that God blessed Uganda with. Before sunset, we were in Gulu town for the Robotics Camp. That evening, the trainers that had arrived for the camp all gathered to be taken through the materials and resources that were going to be used for the next two weeks in the camp. As a software developer without much knowledge in hardware/embedded systems, most of the terms and materials were so new to me - stuff like the PCDuino, Arduino, Breadboard, Link...

What was your experience during school and while growing up? Well, mine was not so different from the many Ugandans’ of my times and before. The school curriculum included Mathematics, English, and Social Studies and Science including other activities like Physical Exercises and outside school, I would learn how to do house chores.  All I had to think about was the four subjects, who to play with and when to play. Problems were for the grown-ups and they were the ones to solve them. Then, none or just one person in the whole society owned a mobile phone which was mostly likely to be a company phone as Technology was just in its initial stages of development. Computers were owned by very big companies if not only the government ministries. Communication was through letters if not physical. And data in schools, businesses, hospitals, police stations and banks was recorded on and stored in hard copy,  usually a huge stack of papers in enormous box files. If I was to a...

From the age of 12 and along the way, we start trying to find out who we really want to be basing on our interests, experiences and the environment we live in. It’s all human and natural to have a series of career dreams. Today you want to be a doctor, the next time u you want to be a teacher and at the end you turn out to be something totally different. The biggest percentage of people end up studying things that are so altered from their interests, some changing from one field to another until they get one that best suits their interests and the few lucky ones do what they were interested in from the beginning. We always sit back and criticize how our education system does not let us find out what we are interested in because, we continuously base on the points to know what to do in the higher levels. And yet we could do something about it.  If you had a chance to interact with kids in middle school or high school, they are filled with delightful dreams which are all sha...

In my childhood, I always wondered why kids loved finding out new stuff and most times they would mess up things, but surprisingly that never stopped them from trying so hard to learn and innovate unique stuff. Even when they were punished for their mess, they kept adventuring which eventually developed and later made them discover unique things. Their experience arose a high degree of curiosity in me, I was left wondering what keeps them going, where do they get the motivation and what sustains it? But as I grew up I was caught up by the ever increasing influence of technology in the world today. It is so astonishing that today every social, economic, political systems and institutions cannot perform effectively without technology. Inspired by the influence of technology, I applied for a computer science course at Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST). Due to the passion for Technology, I learned a lot of skills which include developing in many progr...